Syria: Radicals Unleash Carnage Undermining HTS Leaders’ Guest For International Recognition (Videos, 18+)

Abu Mohammad al-Julani

Days after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria tries to rebuild. A transitional government led by Mohammed al-Bashir (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham appointee) would govern the country for the next few months. The main and obvious challenge facing the new authorities is to stop the atrocities in the country.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Nusra Front) unites many groups, ranging from the so-called ‘moderate opposition’ to the radicals. The leader of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is trying to show reasonable political behaviour.

This attitude is very different from what we saw four years ago and before. Today, his rhetoric does not correlate with his violent extremism before. He argues that the country needs peace because people are tired of war, and therefore the country is not ready for another war and should not be dragged into it. This is what al-Joulani said in an interview with Sky News.

Al-Julani (HTS leader) and al-Bashir (HTS-appointed Prime minister of the Syrian Interim Government) have a good example to follow. This is the Afghan Taliban. In the 1990s, this organisation carried uncompromising radicalism on its banners. After 2001, the Taliban began to concentrate relying solely on the local population in its fight against the external invader, the United States. The Taliban transformed itself, gaining strength from within Afghanistan and forming its own, as yet unofficial, power vertical. By early 2014, the Taliban were already functioning as a full-fledged state within a state. It is unclear who is in which state, whether it is the Taliban in American-occupied Afghanistan or the besieged Americans in Taliban Afghanistan. After coming to power in 2021, the Taliban focused on nation-building and international relations with its neighbours. Yes, the country has severely restricted women’s rights and generally imposed Sharia law. Similar rules and regulations are in place in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf monarchies. The Taliban, amazingly, have gone from being a source of trouble to a pillar of security in the region. Drug trafficking from Afghanistan, for example, has fallen many times compared with the period of the US occupation.

Apparently inspired by the success of the Taliban, the leader of HTS has publicly stated that he is against ethnic cleansing and the destruction of entire religious communities.

There is a strong nuance to this, however. The HTS, let alone the SNA (Syrian National Army, previously the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and also known as the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA), is not a monolithic Taliban. It is a multitude of regional groups with different visions and motivations under the umbrella of HTS and SNA. Worst of all, it is the many different adventurers, mercenaries, criminals, sadists and perverts who joined this alliance. The latter, not born in Syria, had been deliberately recruited through the efforts and money of Israel and Turkey.

In recent days there have been numerous reports of massacres coming out of Syria. They are being carried out by extremists who have no regard for their central command. All the more so when crowds of locals are hungry for bloody spectacles. This is the East, this is the usual millennia-old practice of revenge against neighbours, but not by their own hands, but by the hands of aliens.

They shot Alawites in the Al-Rabiya farm in Latakia province just because of their confession. The perpetrators call those killed “Nusayrite pigs”.

In the countryside of Homs province, militants proudly reported purging a village of its Alawite population. “Allahu Akbar, Maghawir al-Sham! The village of Nusayrite has been purified,” a voice says.

Within 24 hours, clips of brutal massacres were circulating on the Internet. The victims are mostly Alawites. According to the militants, they were the backbone of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Horrifying images from the city of Manbij have been published. Militants of the Syrian National Army (SNA), not only loot and rape the local population, but also shoot wounded fighters of Kurdish units in the hospital. In the video, the war criminals are communicating in Uzbek. Separate remarks in bad Russian can also be heard. So, these are militants from Central Asia. Such scumbags are not all in the ranks of the SNA, but there are many of them, one in three. They feel hatred for the entire population of Syria, because they have come for booty and experience, and nothing else interests them.

To prevent violence, Abu Mohammad al-Julani has ordered military units to leave the cities. Most fighters are likely to obey the order. But it is not certain that all will. Fighters from radical groups within Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and even more so from the Syrian National Army, may defy the HTS leader’s orders. This is a serious destabilizing factor not only for Syria but for the entire region.

Note that the Americans are probably aware of this and are therefore almost silent. The same goes for the Arab monarchies.

The situation has been aggravated by the fact that the State of Israel intervened in the Syrian crisis, despite the fact that the leaders of HTS and the Syrian ‘interim government’ rejected the idea of a ‘March on Jerusalem’. It was an ideological pillar of many militants. Not the thugs who marched for lucre or the bigots who could only shoot the wounded, but those who were truly motivated by the idea of ‘liberating Jerusalem’.

Clashes between some militant groups and the Israeli army are inevitable.

On 10 December, Israeli battle tanks were seen 20 kilometres from Damascus and Jewish special forces raided groups in the suburbs of Damascus (on the night of 11 December they moved 20 to 40 kilometres from the Syrian capital). Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that he intends to take strategic positions in Syria in order to secure his country’s northern borders.

Could these Israeli actions have any impact on stopping the massacres inside Syria? Obviously not. They will only contribute to them. The Jews do not have the forces and means to occupy Damascus. Neither do the USA, Iran and Russia. But for some reason the Persians and the Russians and the Americans and even the Turks are not trying to conquer new territories in Syria with their troops, but the Jews are.

Any action by external powers to occupy the territory of Syria will contribute to the growing terror inside the country. And then outside.

This is what happens whenever there is a violent change of power. It happened in France in 1793, in Russia in 1917, during the Arab Spring in 2011, many times in Latin America and always in Africa.

Al-Julani promised to find and punish all Syrian Arab Army and Mukhabarat officers involved in torture and war crimes. Such an approach is understandable. But all forces in the region practised it against their ‘enemies’. This means that if you have taken over a country and want to establish a just system and consolidate your power, you have to punish everyone according to the same rules, both your own and those of others.

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